Is Firhall village idyllic or Britain's most offensive place to live?
Set in landscaped parkland it has a lavishly fitted kitchen with integrated microwave and fridge-freezer, an en suite shower-room as well as what the estate agent describes as a “family” bathroom. Within easy striking distance of two championship golf courses and Inverness airport it looks attractively priced to English eyes at offers over £165,000.
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| photo credit pixabay.com |
But be warned: the house comes with one major drawback for anyone with the kind of family who might normally be expected to use that bathroom. Not only must you be over 45 to buy it, you also may not have any children under the age of 16 – or if you do you’ll have to lodge them elsewhere.
Welcome to Firhall, Britain’s first purpose-built, child-free village. A long list of rules bans keeping ducks, pigeons, rabbits and bees, as well as the making or sale of wines, spirits or other intoxicating liquors. Conservatories may only be erected with prior written consent and no more than one dog or cat may be kept by each household.
But it’s the prohibition of under-16s, who may only visit for a maximum of three weeks at a time and a total of three months in any year, that prompted hysterical headlines when plans for the development were first unveiled in 1999.
It was denounced as a sterile and artificial encampment of child-haters.
“I’m worried greatly by the idea of age segregation,” said Alan Walker, professor of social policy and social gerontology at Sheffield University, in a documentary about Firhall on BBC Radio 4 last night. “Inter-generational relations are the basic building block of all cohesive societies so if you find either the segregation of the young or the old in a society it raises sharp questions about the extent of that inter-generational solidarity.”
But the residents of Firhall, who range in age from a youthful 45 to 90-something, are having too good a time to be bothered. For an annual service charge of about £1,000 they get unlimited use of a country clubhouse with library, lounge and fitness room, they have trout-fishing rights on the River Nairn and there’s a lively programme of social activities from lunch parties to line-dancing.
And David Eccles, chair of the resident-run Firhall Trust, enthuses: “One thing about Firhall Village is that you get older much more slowly.
We’re an active community. We can go fishing, we can go walking and because we have our independence we can grow old at our own pace. I don’t think we are child-haters. We’ve got families, we’ve got grandchildren. There’s nothing to stop them coming to stay. But not having children living here all the time gives us a certain measure of peace and quiet, which is what many of us look forward to as we get older.”
Trying to anticipate every eventuality, the developers considered the possibility of parents dying in a car crash and leaving their children to the custody of the grandparents. In such a tragic case the grandparents would not be required to leave Firhall and the other residents would be expected to turn a tolerant blind eye.
Fortunately that hasn’t been tested yet. A few people have left, including a childless couple who mistakenly thought that living in a child-free environment would ease the heartache of their own infertility.
